Good Site for New Developers

Here's a cool site for Developers who are new to SharePoint -

http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

MOSS 2007 Stand-alone Training Kit

Microsoft has released a Free MOSS 2007 Training Kit that includes Tutorials, Videos, Code-samples and more.

This is the description posted on the download page -
The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training Standalone Edition is designed to help you learn how to use the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. The Training topics lead you step-by-step through beginning to advanced features, including Collaboration, Business Processes and Forms, Portals and Personalization, Search, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management

The Stand-alone version of the Kit can be downloaded here -
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7BB3A2A3-6A9F-49F4-84E8-FF3FB71046DF&displaylang=en

There is also a server version of the same, which allows the kit to be hosted on a website.

Microsoft Search Server 2008

Microsoft has recently launched the Microsoft Search Server 2008 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express { Free Edition} . This product enables enterprises to implement enterprise wide search.
So if an organization need just search then this is the product to go for. There is no need to buy Office Server 2007 Enterprise which originally came out with the search functionality.

More about the features here -
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/features.aspx#si

Quite a move from Microsoft - it sure does know how to create products out of features and functionality - nice lesson in innvoation and selling.

Microsoft DreamSpark

Microsoft is giving out its latest Developer tool to students free-of-cost to encourage them to take up programming at a young age and to initiate them into the cutting edge technologies as well.
The download bundle includes -
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
Microsoft Xpression Studio
Microsoft Windows Server 2008
XNA Game Studio

Currently it is available only in United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium. Soon other countries will be added. We being one of the countries with the largest talent pool in IT will benefit immensly from this program.

As they say - "good programmers start early" lets hope our youngsters get started on these cutting edge tools and go on to become talented programmers and architects.

Any student can participate in the DreamSpark program and download the tools here -
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

SharePoint, WSS and Office Screencasts

I found some nice screen-casts for SharePoint 2007, WSS 3.0 and Office 2007 Screencasts here :-
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905382.aspx

The same are also having links here -
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=BD5C77B0-F556-4136-8730-1D7FEEAE0A42&displaylang=en

Most of these are by Ted Pattison of Ted Patisson Group - http://www.tedpattison.net/

Screencasts are a fun-way to learn - Happy Learning

More than 200 Case Studies on MOSS 2007

I was just browsing the Case-studies site and found that it has more than 200 case studies on MOSS 2007 at this link -
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/search.aspx?ProTaxID=1902

You can also find a small list of TOP 17 MOSS 2007 Case studies on the SharePoint Products and Technology Team Blog -
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/05/03/top-17-case-studies-for-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-and-several-new-moss-based-web-sites.aspx

If you'd like to search for Industry specific case-studies then please filter based on industry on the Microsoft Case-studies website (Link is given in the previous post).